Sunday, April 07, 2013

past pieces of toronto: bata headquarters

From November 2011 through July 2012 I wrote the "Past Pieces of Toronto" column for OpenFile, which explored elements of the city which no longer exist. The following was originally posted on April 8, 2012.

Thomas Bata was proud that the Don Mills headquarters of his shoe empire
was designed so that it couldn’t be expanded. He believed that the role
of headquarters was not to dictate corporate policy, but to act as
catalyst for stimulating new approaches to marketing and product
development. “In outlining our specification to the architect,” he wrote
in his autobiography Bata Shoemaker to the World, “we insisted
that the building should be designed so that, if we were ever tempted
to spawn a huge bureaucracy, we would be thwarted by the lack of space
and immovable walls.” While Thomas Bata’s vision was fine as long as his
company retained the property, it didn’t serve the building when it
passed to other hands.

When Bata moved its base of operations from England to Canada in the early 1960s management briefly considered Batawa,
the company town north of Trenton that the shoemaker developed during
World War II, for the new headquarters. Issues Thomas Bata experienced
across the Atlantic soured him on the idea. “I was aware of the problems
that can arise when local management and corporate executives operate
out of the same location,” he noted. “Seemingly trivial issues, such as
who presides at public functions and whose wife opens the flower show,
can become a source of friction. Above all, I was concerned that my
presence in Batawa might undermine the stature and authority of the
person who was running the Canadian company.” Thomas also worried about
the lack of nearby international airports.

The company settled on a site on Wynford Drive and hired architect John B. Parkin
to design the headquarters. Parkin was no stranger to the Bata family,
having designed the family home in Batawa. Thomas’s wife Sonja consulted
on the design sketches with Parkin. When two designs were shown to
Thomas, he noted one was far superior to the other. “I always suspect,”
he later wrote, “that the second sketch was a decoy, to make me believe
the final decision was mine.” Completed by 1965, the building resembled a
rectangle sitting atop umbrella-like columns.

When Bata moved its headquarters back to Europe in 2002, the building
was placed on the market for $10 million. After several months, it was
purchased by the Aga Khan Council for Canada, which had already bought
an adjoining property to build an Ismali cultural centre. The timing was
fortuitous, as the Aga Khan was having problems securing land in
London, England for a planned museum of Islamic art. The museum concept was transplanted to Don Mills, and plans began for a $300 million combined complex.

Though the Bata headquarters earned a heritage listing as a fine
example of 1960s-era modernist architecture, it wasn’t a designated
property. A battle between preservationists and the Aga Khan Council
flared up in September 2005 when the building’s fate was placed in the
hands of municipal politicians. The arguments boiled down to preserving
an example of a period of architecture that was disappearing from the
city versus a prestigious new development. Project backers claimed that
the building didn’t fit into their vision—according to former Aga Khan
Council president Firoz Rasul, “an office building cannot be a symbol of
anything, not a synagogue, not a church, not a temple or a mosque.”
Among local newspaper architecture columnists, the Star’s
Christopher Hume argued the building’s columns, which he felt were
reminiscent of a Greek temple, paid “homage to the past while extolling
the virtues of the future" (though he later praised the Aga Khan project), while the Globe and Mail’s
Lisa Rochon thought its north elevation was “clumsy” and the large
spread of surface parking fulfilled “the deadening formula of the
industrial office complex.”

Where did the Bata family stand? Sonja supported the Aga Khan
project, even if the destruction of her old office stirred up emotions.
“I wanted to have a piece of excellent architecture in Canada then and
this is what we achieved,” she told the Globe and Mail. “But I think the time now has come to change. [The Aga Khan] project will be much better than what we have right now.”

City council agreed with Sonja. The demolition request received
near-unanimous approval. Construction of the Aga Khan Museum is ongoing.

Additional material from Bata Shoemaker to the World by
Thomas J. Bata with Sonja Sinclair (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990), the
October 11, 2002, September 19, 2005, September 20, 2005, and September
22, 2005 editions of the Globe and Mail, and the September 20, 2005 edition of the Toronto Star.